


Wicked Hearts

by BlossomsintheMist, Ossobuco



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Orlais
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 12:42:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3174034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlossomsintheMist/pseuds/BlossomsintheMist, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ossobuco/pseuds/Ossobuco
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As a child, Arelan Mahariel was taken from his clan and raised by a bardmaster in Orlais--and years ago, Lyna Mahariel lost her brother when their clan was attacked by Orlesian chevaliers. Following the end of the Fifth Blight, Warden-Commander Lyna travels to Montsimmard on Warden business, where Arelan has taken his latest assignment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wicked Hearts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lyna's first night at her accommodations outside Montsimmard.

Bloody Orlesians.

Lyna turned over again on the bed, the sinking softness of the down mattress and the stuffy silence of her room adding a sense of claustrophobia to her existing troubles. She had only just arrived at Villa Maurel for her stay of several weeks, and already she despised it—its grotesque sprawl over the land, its opulence, its uneasy feeling of segregation from the people of the city—only adding to her distaste for the nobility with whom she planned to meet on the following day.

The villa was the summer home of one of their cousins or sisters-in-law or somesuch, offered to Lyna for her convenience and as thanks for hearing their requests. At least, she supposed, it was both quieter and more private than lodging with the Grey Wardens would have been. Unfortunately, this was hard to appreciate when every glance out its intricate glass windows reminded her of where exactly it stood.

Here, long ago, her people had stood against the Chantry’s armies; here, they had been slaughtered, rather than abandon their gods and their way of life. The graves of her ancestors lay hardly a mile from the gates of the villa, its foundations built on earth soaked with elvhen blood.

(She turned onto her other side, stretching out her legs and grumbling into her pillow. The bed was enormous, adorned with curtains and thick-piled blankets that threatened to swallow her up, smelling heavily of musty old flowers and oily perfume, the mattress so soft that it made her knees ache. How could anyone sleep on this?)

What had it been like during the Exalted March, to face overwhelming numbers and know there was only one possible outcome? To carry the last hopes of an entire people on one’s shoulders, and to fail?

The still air was almost maddening. She would have gone out to walk the grounds, but she was sure that the sound of dressing and donning her armor would wake Harel—that whatever he’d said to her earlier, he must have been accustomed to waking for all kinds of requests at odd hours. Instead, she rolled onto quiet feet and pulled open one of the windows. At least the moving air and the soft groaning of the trees would give her something to keep her mind occupied. For several minutes, she stood at the window, arms braced on the sill. The villa’s grounds were sparse and lit faintly by star- and moonlight, but beyond the walls, the thickness of the forest surrounded them with immense blue-black night.

What had Harel said about the villa? A gesture—and not a kind one. So, she imagined, was being attended to by an elvhen servant; the Orlesian nobility, so skilled as they were in the Game, could not have been so ignorant. Harel seemed a decent young man, both clever and, if not kind, at least polite. Their conversation that evening had genuinely brightened her spirits. Still, thinking back, there was something unsettling about him. She couldn’t place it. His voice was familiar in an entirely unidentifiable way, and the way he’d repeated her elvish words was…

He would be about the same age as Arelan, she guessed with a raw pang in her gut. Arelan, her little brother—her brother whom she’d let die.

With a defeated huff of breath, she returned to bed, plunging into the airy silk, feeling a lurch in her stomach for one lavender-scented moment before the bedding settled and she came to rest.


End file.
